For those of you who simply can’t get enough of me, I’m now a regular guest on Richard Chirgwin’s weekly podcast A Series of Tubes.
Two more articles on Internet Censorship
Two more articles from me about Internet censorship today. And it’s only Monday. I wonder what the rest of the week will produce?
- Google Takes a Slash and the world ends in Crikey, which riffs off the weekend’s glitch at Google and yesterday’s Internet outage in Melbourne and concludes that a glitch in ISP-level filters could cause massive problems.
- Christian Lobby: The New Lions Of Clean Feed in New Matilda, which looks at the dodgy arguments being deployed by the latest pro-censorship warrior, Jim Wallace from the Australian Christian Lobby.
Hey New Matilda, I know I haven’t included your logo, just Crikey‘s. But I couldn’t be arsed doing pixel-pushing just now. You’ll cope.
Finally, something positive about journalism and Twitter!
Those of you who’ve been reading me for a while will know I get frustrated by the curmudgeonly journalists who whinge that the end of the world is nigh. (If not, here’s a catch-up reading list.) Finally today I found a more positive view with which I wholeheartedly agree.
Reuters news editor David Schlesinger has been using Twitter to cover the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. His live tweets broke news even faster than Reuters’ own news wires. But is he worried this is the end of journalism? No.
Bring it on, I say!
There’s a nice slab of Schlesinger’s full blog post, as well as the comment I posted, over the fold.
Continue reading “Finally, something positive about journalism and Twitter!”
SMH readers don’t like Internet censorship either
The Letters Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald confirms today that there’s little support for Senator Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall. “There was near unanimity on the date when the Federal Government’s internet filter should be implemented — never. One or two sided with Jim Wallace’s opinion piece, but many more put cogent and scornful arguments against.” I’ve already had my say.
Choosing who I follow on Twitter
Since being listed as an “interesting Aussie Twitter user” at NEWS.com.au the other night, I’ve gained 300-ish new followers. Here’s how I’ve been deciding who to follow back.
First, though, I don’t think Twitter starts to make sense unless you have a reasonable number of people in your network. For me, the penny dropped when I had about 50 followers and followees, and you actually interact with them. At that point I started to see the live communication rippling through the hyperconnected mob. It helped that I already knew some well-connected geeks to get the ball rolling.
Once you hit hundreds of followers, though, there’s a phase shift. You simply can’t see everything that happens. It scrolls by too fast. At first that’s stressful — until you realise there’s always more in the world than you can ever experience. So another penny drops, and you detach. Zen. The Twitter-river flows on 24/7, but you don’t stop to watch every fish.
I use Tweetdeck most of the time, not Twitter’s standard web interface, because I can create groups of people. The unfiltered Twitterstream rolls by on the left of my screen, with separate groups for close friends, for media contacts I need to keep an eye on, direct messages and so on. Another panel shows everyone who replies to me or mentions me. So while I can’t see everything on the main stream, just mentioning me will grab my attention.
(I daresay it changes again when you’re like Stephen Fry with more than 88,000 followers. [Update 5 February 2009: It’s now more than 122,000.] May the gods forbid I reach that level of fame! He wouldn’t even be able to monitor all his @replies and DMs!)
So, how do I choose who to follow? Here’s what I’ve noticed today.
I’m interesting… and you’re not
So… Right now there’s this graphic with two canaries on the very motherfucking front page of NEWS.com.au which links to a story listing 10 of Australia’s most interesting Twitter users. I’m one of them.
Stilgherrian (@stilgherrian) Fiercely opinionated blogger and former broadcaster Stilgherrian (“yes, I only have one name,” he says) is one of the busiest Twitter users in Australia with more than 16,000 posts. Subscribe to his feed for thoughts on media, technology and politics from a web-savvy point of view.
Example: “In all of this, pls differentiate between ‘news’, which we all pass on, and ‘The News’, which journalists manufacture.”
I wonder why they didn’t pick example tweets like this or this or this?
Continue reading “I’m interesting… and you’re not”